Drug Users Have Link To Sterile Needles

Pager System Starts In Northwest Suburbs

A discreet call to a pager is the newest weapon against drugs and drug-related diseases such as HIV and hepatitis in the northwest suburbs.

The page will be returned by a worker from Chicago Recovery Alliance who can provide free, sterile needles, counseling and blood tests to detect illnesses.

The northwest suburbs "were the last area of unmet need" from public health officials and private agencies in Cook County on drug abuse, said Curt Hicks, regional coordinator of HIV prevention for the county.

More drug users are found in Chicago and some south and western suburbs, so those areas already have received clean needle exchanges and counseling centers, he said.

Chicago Recovery Alliance, a needle exchange group, will now help northwest suburban drug users get sterile needles and syringes needed to prevent the spread of deadly infection associated with drug use.

The county does not fund the needle exchange program, but it did give Chicago Recovery Alliance $24,000 toward counseling, Hicks said.

Chicago Recovery Alliance is one of only two organizations allowed under Illinois law to distribute free syringes. The other is Community Outreach Intervention at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Illinois is one of eight states that require a prescription to buy or distribute syringes. The two groups are allowed to distribute needles because they also are conducting drug research.

Dan Bigg, executive director of Chicago Recovery Alliance, estimates there are about 60,000 drug users in the Chicago area. But the convergence of two trends hint that intravenous drug use may be rising in the suburbs, both he and Hicks said.

First, heroin has become more pure, driving users to more quickly turn to injecting the drug directly for a more efficient high, and second, drug counselors in the western suburbs are seeing carloads of suburban teenagers looking for heroin, they said.

About 15 percent of drug users in the county are from Elk Grove Village north, while 24 percent hail from the southwest suburbs, Hicks estimates.

During a two-year study of drug users in the northwest suburbs, 273 intravenous drug users were reported at county health clinics or emergency rooms, Hicks said. But that number is misleading because if a drug user made six visits, each visit counted as a user. Five of the cases had tested positive for HIV, he said.

Although the number of drug users in the northwest suburbs is relatively low, their affluence makes it easier for them to hide their habit, said public health officials and health advocates. And that secrecy is tougher for counselors and agencies to break through.

"The richer an area is, the more people have to lose from not hiding their drug use," Bigg said.

Each week, his group hands out an average of 30,000 syringes to as many as 300 drug users at two storefronts and in weekly visits by a van in Chicago, the south suburbs, western suburbs and Evanston, Bigg said. On average, Chicago Recovery Alliance made contact with about 50 northwest suburban drug users who drove to Cicero or Bellwood for exchanges, he said.

After consulting with some of these drug users, the agency determined that van visits to places like Rolling Meadows would not work because people want to remain anonymous. Instead, a paging system provides confidentiality.

Northwest suburban drug users who want to exchange needles can page Chicago Recovery Alliance at 847-834-2461. Someone from the agency will return the phone call and arrange to meet the user.

Drug users who inject are "10 times more likely to test positive for HIV than heterosexuals," Hicks said. "And about 90 percent of heterosexual HIV infections were due to sexual transmission from an injector.

"We also know that about 95 percent of babies born infected had a father or mother who was an injector," Hicks said. "That is one of the reasons it is so important we address this issue."